Grounded

Faa Cites Limitations Of Age For Retiring Pilots At 60

When Capt. Carl Price awoke the morning of his 60th birthday, he reached two milestones: the big six-oh and the end of his career in the cockpit at American Airlines.

Airline pilots such as Price who fly commercial carriers, including American, Delta, United and Southwest Airlines, must retire at 60 under the Federal Aviation Administration's Age 60 Rule.

Mandatory retirement seems to contradict the federal age-discrimination law that protects most workers, but pilots don't have an ordinary desk job, with job performance judged on sales or generated revenue. Their job performance is based on flight safety.

Price retired as chief pilot at American Airlines in Chicago March 17 but didn't view retirement as forced--rather an accepted and understood nature of the business.

"I knew the day I was hired the day I would retire," says Price, who joined American in 1966. "As a pilot, there's no choice, but that's fine, and I made plans accordingly."

The FAA bases the age limit on the fact that as people age, their physical and mental functions, such as hearing, sight and memory, deteriorate. Pilots must be in top condition. Because there is no definitive way to determine at what age a person's health begins to wane, the FAA enforces the regulation to ensure safety in the skies.

"The rule is based on the proven fact that at a certain age people's perceptions, reflexes and abilities decrease," says Elizabeth Isham Cory, spokeswoman for the FAA's Great Lakes region. "This rule is for the safety of the general public."

"There's nothing magic about age 60," adds John Mazor, spokesman for the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), an AFL-CIO chartered union representing more than 53,000 airline pilots at 51 U.S. and Canadian airlines. "The rule is implemented for safety. ALPA supports the rule."

The Age 60 Rule was adopted by the then Federal Aviation Agency in December 1959, when medical reports were evaluated and, because of concerns that pilots' health would affect safety, a retirement age was proposed..

The agency studied how age decreases a person's physical and psychological functions. According to the findings, the affects of age varied from person to person and couldn't be predicted; therefore, an age limit was instituted across-the-board.

The agency acknowledged that age 60 wasn't dictated by science, but it was within the range when health issues could hurt job performance. And because pilots have years of common training and flying under their "wings," experience is not much of an issue.

Throughout its 40 years, the retirement regulation has met controversy, as pilots and organizations have sought to abolish the rule they view as discriminatory.

The FAA has commissioned numerous studies through the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C., to test how age affects pilots. From the reports, the FAA repeatedly concluded that the limit must be retained because age-related health matters could affect the ability to pilot an aircraft, and there's no scientific way to pinpoint when things become dangerous.

"We agree with the gist of the NIH report," Mazor says, "unless or until we can come up with a testing formula that will allow us to confidently pass and fail pilots as they get past a certain age. In a perfect world, we would want a way to do it to have more fairness.

"Until we can do that, admittedly, it's a conservative and arbitrary approach."

In workplaces, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 prohibits people 40 and older from being discriminated against because of age. However, the federal law exempts jobs where performance can be affected by age.

Because most professions don't impose mandatory retirement, opponents of the Age 60 Rule say it's discriminatory, especially when it can't be proven that it's unsafe for a pilot to fly after 60.

Pilots' physical and mental conditions and competency are constantly scrutinized throughout their careers by strict FAA regulations. Pilots are required to undergo physical exams by an FAA-licensed aeromedical examiner every six months. They include hearing, sight and cardiogram tests. If pilots don't pass, they can't fly.

Also, the FAA goes on check rides--announced and unannounced--in which agency representatives sit in the cockpit and grade the pilot's performance.

"The purpose of the medical exam is the responsibility of pilots to have a high level of skills and alertness on duty," says Cory. With the exams and check rides, the FAA looks for the pilots' proficiency and efficiency in handling the aircraft. Seasoned flyers, commercial pilots also undergo extensive training every year that includes simulator testing of mandatory maneuvers, such as equipment failure, engine failure on take-off, landings in violent weather, and emergency scenarios, such as engine failure on take off.

"The bar is maintained at a very high level," says Price. "If anyone begins to slip, the FAA is going to catch it."